Borusan Contemporary is opening the first Turkish solo exhibition dedicated to Italian photographer Olivo Barbieri. Time Space Geometry will be running from September 19, 2026 through August 15, 2027. Curated by Fırat Arapoğlu, the show draws together five bodies of work spanning more than twenty years of Barbieri’s career, tracing a practice built around optical manipulation and shifts in scale that make recognisable places feel unfamiliar, even miniature. The exhibition is on view across the office floors of Perili Köşk, the Bosphorus-facing mansion that doubles as Borusan Holding’s headquarters and a public art venue.
At the centre of the show is a new series commissioned by the Borusan Contemporary Art Collection in 2023, for which Barbieri traveled across Türkiye photographing nine ancient sites, including Ephesus, Aphrodisias and Hierapolis. These images, shown publicly for the first time, sit alongside four earlier series: site specific_, which reframes dense cities like Shanghai and Rome from elevated vantage points; Alps – Geographies and People; Capri; and The Waterfall Project, which turns Barbieri’s lens on some of the world’s most photographed waterfalls.
It’s The Waterfall Project in particular that opens onto an environmental undercurrent running through the exhibition. Barbieri’s images register the tourism infrastructure and spectacle that now surround them, serving as a reminder that even the most iconic ‘untouched’ landscapes have already been heavily shaped by human use and consumption. The tension between nature and its packaging echoes in other moments of the show too, particularly in how the Alps series treats mountains not as terrain which is inseparable from the people who move through it.
Across all five series, the throughline is Barbieri’s interest in landscape as something capable of being constructed and observed, while also altered by the photographer’s own interventions in scale and perspective. By staging the exhibition inside a functioning corporate headquarters, Borusan Contemporary extends that same idea to the viewing experience itself. Time Space Geometry runs through mid-August 2027.
